Dear Souseh: Curvy and Confused

Dear Souseh,

I’m turning 19 this week, and I made a resolution to lose weight, but I’m really conflicted about it. I’ve been called “ugly” because of my weight, and people have said I’m “not feminine enough,” like my body somehow disqualifies me from being seen as a real woman. I hear comments like “you have such a pretty face, it’s a shame about your body,” and no matter how confident I try to be, those words stay with me. They make me feel like my value is conditional — that thinness is the price I have to pay to be respected, loved, or even taken seriously.

What makes this harder is that I actually have a vibrant social life. I’m sociable, I have friends, I pursue different hobbies, and I enjoy being active in my own way. I laugh, I show up, I try new things. But despite all of that, I’m constantly made to feel like none of it fully counts because of my weight. It’s as if everything good about me is overshadowed by how my body looks, as though my personality, talents, and joy are secondary to my size.

My mother is supportive and constantly encourages me to love my body as it is. She reminds me that I’m healthy, capable, and worthy. I know she wants me to grow up confident and self-accepting. Still, it’s incredibly hard to hold onto her words when I’m surrounded by social media every day that shows perfect bodies, edited photos, and messages that praise thinness as the ultimate achievement.

I keep receiving messages, spoken and unspoken, that thinness will bring me happiness, confidence, a husband, and even a successful career. At the same time, as an Arab, I am captivated by old photos of classic Egyptian movie actresses, women who were symbols of beauty, elegance, femininity, and grace, even though they were clearly curvy. They were celebrated, admired, and iconic. When I look at them, I can’t help but wonder: What changed? When did bodies like theirs stop being beautiful and start being policed? Why am I being taught to hate my own body? 

Please advise me: how do I protect my self-worth in a world that keeps telling me my body is a problem? How do I decide whether changing my body is an act of self-care or self-erasure, and how can I learn to value myself now, not just in some thinner future I’m promised will finally be enough?

Yours truly,
Curved and Confused

Dear Curvy and Confused,

Your letter brought tears to my eyes, because I could have written the very same one at 19. And at 20, and 22, and every age until about 31, at which point I lost a bunch of weight (and got a whole new set of issues to contend with). This letter hits so close to the heart in fact that I hesitated about choosing to answer it, because it speaks to something I’ve kept mostly private, or at least, never overtly referenced or discussed in my public-facing writing. And when I say I could have written the same letter, I mean it. Because like you, I was social, active, outgoing, never lacking for friends or hobbies or activities. Like you, I was forced to endure the lamentations of pity for my poor, pretty face, trapped in its unhappy marriage to that deadbeat of a body. I also had — have — a supportive, loving mother who never shamed me and tried to encourage self-love. And most fundamentally, I also struggled to hold fast to any encouragement in the tides of criticism otherwise coming at me from every angle, cultural and social. So I’m speaking to you from deep and long experience, and one that straddles both sides of the divide, having lived equally in a body perceived as “a problem,” as you write, and one that conformed to more conventional standards.

You ask many questions here, and all of them are excellent. I’m going to tackle them in order, because they move quite ideally from the universal to the more personal. First, let’s get the universal out of the way. You mention Egyptian actresses and their curvy bodies and how once upon a time such bodies were perceived as “symbols of beauty, elegance, femininity, and grace.” And you ask, “What changed? When did bodies like theirs stop being beautiful and start being policed?”

The sad answer is: nothing has changed. What you’re describing are the beauty standards of a particular time and place, and they were just as stringent and unforgiving as they are now. (There is also the fact that what appears curvy to the modern eye remains quite petite and restrictive — which is why you have the persistent myth of Marilyn Monroe being plus size according to modern standards, which is patently untrue.) The actresses you speak of were equally confined to narrow parameters, their bodies equally policed. Whether a cage permits you two paces or ten, whether you are able to stand up in it fully or only halfway, it remains a cage.

I’m not sure there has ever been a point in history when women’s bodies weren’t being somehow policed, when women weren’t being reminded of the ideal of which they were inevitably falling short. Even — maybe even especially — those women held up as icons are taught to hate their own bodies. Because a sex symbol is just that: a symbol, a representation, an abstraction of a particular concept. And real bodies are anything but abstract. Because they belong to a particular person, the shape of whose body is affected by so many different things, external and internal. And so there’s a profound aberration in what we are asked to do in order to become desirable in such a way that conforms to a particular iconography. We are tasked with erasing the particular from our bodies, abstracting them into mere symbols. And given that we now have the medical and technical capacity to do so, we are all seeing what happens when we deconstruct our bodies, treating each feature as a separate component that needs to conform to the ideal of that particular feature. (This is setting aside even the complicated question of which race sets the standard for each feature, i.e., which genotypes are considered the ideal.)

The result is that you end up with bodies and faces that look incongruous and uncanny. Much more obvious, however, is that you end up with bodies and faces that look eerily similar. From which most, if not all, identifying individual markers have been erased. To abstract a body from the self that inhabits it is an essentially dehumanizing act. A socially-imposed process of depersonalization, whereby one becomes dissociated from the sensory pleasure that grounds us in the world. When you are asked to perceive your body from the outside, as only image, then you are losing access to all the things that make the body a delight to have. Your body is how you receive the pleasures of the world. If you are forced to see it as an object, then that is what you become. A thing that doesn’t act, but is only acted upon.

This, as we know, is an imposition primarily placed on women. Why? Why are we being taught to hate our own bodies? Is it the patriarchy? Is it a fear of mortality projected back onto the bodies biologically intended to give birth to new life? Is it consumerism, capitalism? Is it culture? Does it matter? Does it matter who is teaching you to hate your body and why? Maybe a little, in the sense that knowledge always gives you back a small measure of power, a small measure of control. But I know from experience that this is no consolation at all. When all your achievements are, as you write, being overshadowed by your body, when you feel as though your value were conditional, when you hear pitying comments designed to show you exactly how depersonalized you are in the eyes of the world (for what is “you have such a pretty face if only it weren’t for your body” but a reminder that these two indivisible components of your selfhood can be pulled apart from one another like some customizable doll?), it’s little consolation to remind yourself of how an entirely reality has been built to make you feel lesser-than. In fact, it sometimes only adds to an overall feeling of hopelessness.

And so now that we have all of that established, on to your more personal questions. How do you protect your self-worth in a world that keeps telling you your body is a problem? How do you decide whether changing your body is an act of self-care or self-erasure, and how can you learn to value yourself now, not just “in some thinner future”?

To protect your self-worth requires you first and foremost to believe in that worth yourself. And I feel like you’re already so far along in that process, much farther than most. You know how I can tell? From the next question you ask. Is changing my body an act of self-care or self-erasure? I hear something truly beautiful there, something that promises to be an invaluable asset to you for your whole life: you’re on your own team. You’ve got your own back. It’s such a considerate question, indicative of a fundamental kindness toward oneself. Is changing my body an act of self-care or self-erasure? So few people think to ask it because so few people think to distinguish between these two things. According to the world, to be overweight is by necessity to hate yourself. Ergo, weight loss is self-love, no matter how you go about it, no matter the cost to your overall health. But you know, and I know, that the driver behind this long — in fact lifelong — journey is something that affects your everyday mental (and physical) health. A lot of people lose weight driven by self-loathing. Or shame. Or anger. And you know what? I’m not going to quibble with them; people’s motives are their own business. And some people don’t even think about them. They care about results, not intentions. But the fact that you’re asking this question tells me that intention matters to you, that you wish for kindness and self-love to begin at the root of an action, and that you believe that the nature of one’s resolve is just as, if not more important than, objective.

Here’s the thing. Only you can know what drives you; only you know whether you are changing your body out of self-care or self-erasure. Losing weight is not a single action but changing your entire way of being. Your food choices, your levels of activity, your hydration, your sleep patterns, your mental health, etcetera, etcetera. You might take GLP-1s or go to a nutritionist or get surgery or join a support group. Whatever method or combination of methods a person looking to lose weight pursues, it will always look more or less the same from the outside. So the undertaking itself has no inherent value, moral or otherwise. But the intention behind it will certainly change the approach. Take nutrition for instance. Some nutrition plans are based on control and deprivation. And others, as I’ve learned from the nutritionists I like to follow online, are based on a philosophy of thinking about what you can add to a meal to make it more well-rounded, not what you should take away. So if you’re craving chips, the former approach might tell you to have a handful of chips and then stop, while the latter might tell you to have a handful of chips but to add some beans, say, for fiber, or labneh for calcium and protein. The two snacks might end up looking more or less the same from the outside, but the different attitude behind composing each meal is what makes all the difference and this also changes the feeling (guilt vs. enthusiasm) with which they are consumed. Which brings me to the point that, yes, social media can be extremely destructive for self-image. But it can also grant you access to so many resources and communities if you know where to look. You can easily find things that we older folks never had: not just sound information about nutrition and fitness but also access to cute outfits and accessories for the body you have now, images of infinitely diverse body types as well as online communities of like-minded people where you can vent and lament and share and scheme. All this to say, just the fact that you’re careful and thoughtful enough to ask this question about intention tells me you don’t need to worry about self-erasure.

Finally, how do you learn to value yourself now, and not in some thinner future when you’re promised you’ll finally be enough? Let me tell you, as someone who’s visited that thinner future, valuing yourself remains a lifelong battle. It’s not something you automatically learn how to do and it certainly doesn’t come along with a different body like some two-for-one package deal. To extend the metaphor, these are two separate purchases from two entirely different stores.

Does losing weight make life easier? I won’t lie to you. It absolutely does, in ways big and small. But valuing yourself is something internal. Even when the world treats you like you’re more worthy after losing weight, this doesn’t translate into self-worth. In fact, I spent a good two years feeling absolutely enraged by the difference in the way the world was suddenly treating me, and I had to find a way to work through all that anger before I self-destructed or hurt the people around me. Because I had in fact not changed, and so I was outraged on behalf of the “old me” who I was expected to think about like some dead weight I’d happily shed. But in fact all that garbage the world feeds you about losing weight was just that, garbage. There was no “real me” who was suddenly revealed; no butterfly who emerged from some cocoon of fat. I remained myself in every way imaginable. Yes, things on the outside got easier. But on the inside, I continued with all the same struggles. It was actually shocking how much I remained myself.

And so the good news is, you have a head start on the necessary undertaking of learning how to value yourself. In fact, you have a kind of cheat-code, because to be outside of the conventional standards is to better see them for what they are. They chip away at everyone’s self-worth because they ask us, especially us women, to dismember ourselves into parts, to twist ourselves into the unnatural posture of always looking at ourselves from the outside. And so the (again, lifelong) practice of valuing yourself requires you to focus on wholeness. On reunification, on healing. Seeing yourself as one indivisible unit. Your body is you. Refuse to have it dissected, or taken apart like some Barbie doll. Even inside your own thoughts. There is a mental exercise I used to do whenever I felt covetous over a different appearance, whenever I found myself wishing, say, if only I had those hips or that hair or those thighs or whatever. I would think, ok, if you want that body, then you have to have all of it. Not just the outside but the inside. So you would also have to be willing to trade your face, your bone structure, your internal organs, and hence your genetic makeup. As well as your psychological being and mental health and particular brand of intelligence and emotional landscape and your way of seeing the world. Which then also means your history and your upbringing and all the people you know and love. This is what comes along with a body. Thinking about it this way does two things. First, it reminds you, again, that you are indivisible into component parts. But second, and more importantly, it reminds you of all the things you are, and all the things surrounding you and which ground you in the world: your imagination, your ambition and dreams and talents and humor, as well as your family, your community, and your culture. I say I used to do this because I did it so often it became internalized. And believe me, learning how to replace envy with gratitude is a skill that will serve you in every aspect of your life and see you through so many different struggles that have nothing at all to do with weight. Over time, it changes your entire energy, from one that is grasping and restless to one that is more grounded, self-possessed, and calm. It helps you navigate the world with a lot more grace, and helps you better see what can be changed and what cannot.

I will tell you what I wish I could have said to myself at 19: You are beautiful. I don’t mean that you are beautiful on the inside. Nor do I mean that you have “such a pretty face.” No, you are beautiful because you are young and you have an entire future ahead of you and a whole world to experience and a whole self to develop and endless possibilities before you and you have no idea, no idea how absolutely gorgeous that is, how it radiates from you even on your unhappiest days. You are the precious, irretrievable gift of time itself. One day you will look back at photographs of yourself at this age, the very same photographs you currently dissect for your most minor flaws and think, my god, I was so ridiculously, impossibly beautiful! How could I not see it? You will think, I wish I could have looked into the mirror then with the eyes I have now. Is there a way for me to lend you those eyes, even if just for a minute? Man, I sure hope so.